Morbidity and Me ・・・ The Lure of Disaster

August 2, 2015 — Leave a comment

On the first day of kindergarten, we practiced a tornado drill. The other kids in my class thought nothing of it, but I was terrified. I wasn’t just starting school, but I was in an entirely new country. My family had just moved from Canberra to Ohio. I didn’t really know what a tornado was, considering I was from a place that has pretty unremarkable weather. A few weeks later, there was a real tornado warning on TV. My mother freaked out and made my brother and I hide in the basement. We didn’t really know what we were doing. The tornado missed our county, and the storm passed. I was no longer afraid, I was excited. Continue reading

Interstellar Hype Train 1999・・・ Space Channel 5

July 13, 2015 — Leave a comment

I miss ‘cool Japan’. That post bubble economy, hyper-cute, retro futuristic land of dreams. I basically miss when everything was like a Puffy AmiYumi music video. It seemed that everything cool came from Japan in the late 90s, and video games were no exception. It’s thanks to Konami’s Bemani division that flooded the market with their catalogue of technicoloured, well-timed button mashers. Peripheral games like Beat Mania, Guitar Freaks, Dance Dance Revolution and Pop’n Music dominated the arcade, while more ‘call and response’ styled games such as Bust a Groove and UmJammer Lammy found their home on consoles. Konami dominated the arcades with rhythm games, but another key player in the waning arcade market hadn’t contributed to the flood just yet. I’d say Sega would’ve been focusing more on the upcoming release of the Dreamcast at that stage, and merely dipped their toes in with Samba de Amigo – a cute, but safe entry with maraca peripherals. Continue reading